The interest in the computer networks is growing every day, as more and more users want the capability to access information at remote locations. A computer network is composed of nodes and the communication links between the nodes. In order for a first node to access information at a remote node, the first node must have a way to know that the remote node exists. Thus, the nodes in the network need configuration information that describes the topology of the other nodes in the network.
In prior networks, a predetermined master node would send a query to every node address asking whether a node exists at that address. When the master node received acknowledgments back, it would then know at which addresses other nodes existed. Whenever nodes were added to or removed from the network, the master node needed to repeat these queries to determine the new node topology, which was a time-consuming task. Thus, these prior networks suffered from heavy network traffic and performance problems. Further, if the master node was removed or disabled, the network had no way of determining the network topology.
Hence, there is a need for a solution that overcomes the problems of the prior art and provides an improved technique for determining network topology.